A technician or a field operator, e.g. in a process plant, manufacturing installation, at off-shore platform or an electrical power transmission or distribution installation or substation, needs both to interact with systems or devices in the installed equipment, and to have access to information and documentation about the installed equipment. Various user interfaces, both physical and software interfaces, for the installed equipment, operating devices and systems and so on are often designed differently so that the field operators have to learn how to use a multitude of different user interfaces. The different equipment interfaces may also often be inconsistent with respect to each other.
The field operator, as well as interacting with installed equipment or devices or systems, needs access to documentation of some kind, which may be a manual, historical data, maintenance history & repair reports and the like. Even though the trend is that parts of such documentation has become electronically available, it is often stored in different systems and at different locations. Therefore, the field operators either have to plan information gathering for their work tasks in advance, or they have to interrupt ongoing tasks in order to find and then access support information and documentation for the installed equipment, process or device.
As an example within manufacturing installations, a production line may include several robots, which are usually controlled by separate controllers and/or Teach Pendants. The operator at some point needs to interact with the robots, in order to check a status, for example, inspect operational parameters for the robots or to make a new robot control program. A general drawback is that the operator must change interaction device, in this case switch to another controller or another teach pendant for each robot in succession, even though several robots may be arranged to perform a task together.
Augmented Reality (AR) is a method of overlaying real world representations with computer-generated graphics. Ideally, for vision-based augmented reality, the computer-generated graphics are combined with real world images in a way in which the user will not be able to recognize any difference between the real and the computer-generated graphics. The user will get a perception of the real world environment which is improved by the presence of added visual images.
Augmented reality techniques are used today in a number of applications. Examples of use are within media, for example weather reporting, medicine, for example visualization of internal organs, for collaborative environments, for example virtual meeting rooms, and in the aircraft industry for combinations of real world images and other information on head-up displays and/or in flight simulator projections.
Handheld and wearable control panels with interaction possibilities already exist and interest in such devices is increasing. The use of mobile phones and PDAs as the interface towards systems or devices is known. Also, tablet PCs, which have been used, e.g. within hospitals, provide an interface that the user easily carries around and interacts with by touching the screen.
A newly introduced device is that of virtual keyboards. An image of a keyboard, a virtual keyboard, is projected, onto e.g. a table, and may typically be the input means for a computer of some sort. The user touches or presses the keys of the image, the virtual keyboard, and the an associated system recognizes the specific keys touched as though the user had operated a standard keyboard virtual keyboards are available as commercial products offered by several manufacturers, e.g. Canesta, Senseboard Technologies and Samsung.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,614,422 entitled Method and apparatus for entering data using a virtual input device; discloses digital user input to a companion system such as a PDA, a cell telephone or an appliance device, using a virtual input device such as an image of a keyboard. A sensor captures three-dimensional positional information as to location of the user's fingers in relation to where keys would be on an actual keyboard. This information is processed with respect to finger locations and velocities and shape to determine when a virtual key has been struck. The processed digital information is output to a companion system.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,618,425 entitled virtual laser operator; discloses a laser controller comprising a virtual laser operator. A laser controller interconnected with an electrical discharge laser communicates with a remote computer incorporating a display screen that emulates a conventional keyboard. The display screen has a plurality of images of keys, virtual keys, each emulating a physical key of a conventional keyboard. A keystroke is typically carried out by the operator manually pressing the position of a corresponding virtual key on a touch-sensitive screen, or alternatively by actuating a conventional pointing device.